The Lost Humanism of Political Discourse

American Samizdat: Yes

My first use of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man drawing, six years ago, later to become my inspiration for Homo Vitruvius.

There cannot be only a no. There must be a yes on which it stands. There has to exist an affirmative ground of values and ideas to support the resistant stand – in sinew of arms and legs extended from a torso’s core – against the negation of human dignity and freedom.

This, today, serves as a yes. Originally published in Arc Digital magazine in August 2018, I republish it here revised and updated it for today.

Three weeks from today, on January 18, 2025, two days before the inauguration, for the second time, of Donald Trump as president of the United States, a day to be dreaded, will come the resounding no.

In between the yes and the no on American Samizdat, subscribers will be able to read on Homo Vitruvius the penultimate chapter of Reason for Being in the World.

These are not different, divergent endeavors. The mission of American Samizdat, “art, culture, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people” – to resist, above and underground, if need be, an American demagogue – is an expression as well of the values and mission of Homo Vitruvius: “a writer’s renascent light against the darkness, shined through literature, culture and ideas.” They are the two arms of one writing project. The person who emerges over the course of Reason for Being in the World, with its “intellectual and spiritual accounting of identity,” is the person behind that project. He is the person publishing Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat.

Your readership, and your subscriptions, your likes, comments, shares, and recommendations, and your paid and gift subscriptions, enable me in the project.

Yes.

The Lost Humanism of Political Discourse

Once upon an academic time in literary studies (what undergrads and lay people in the United States call “English”), students learning to analyze works of literature were often directed to consider the presence of thematic dualities.

In the admixed relationships found between love and hate, good and evil, or idealism and egoistic ambition, students might gain, it was believed, both human and intellectual insight into the tritely expressed, but profoundly true, “complexity of life” — and of art. English poet William Blake was even good enough to offer an assist in this understanding with his explicit and famous Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Related polarities — the biblical light from the darkness, male and female, yin and yang — and their perhaps illusory separation, have long been visible in the humanistic perceptual gloaming.

Over the past 40 years, however, both professionally and culturally, the terminology changed: the “dual” gave way to the “binary.” Partly this reflected an aspiration to specialized and discriminating professional jargon. Clearly, too, the term signals the decline in prestige of the humanities, even in human-centered studies themselves, and the continuing ascent of the technological sciences. Yet while literary and now “cultural” studies cannot quite be computer science (though writing programs have come to teach “digital rhetoric”), they might nonetheless aspire to social science, which is also in ascendance, and which many humanists, unfulfilled in their sense of vocational significance, now imagine themselves to produce.

From the dual, then, we arrived at the binary, and the binary, it is theoretically asserted by some, oppresses us with a false structural “either-or”-ism, when reality is some kind of “neither-nor”-ism.

Many other people feel roiled by this challenge to what they consider timeless verities — as those to whom they react do themselves feel increasingly intolerant of the continuing reign they perceive of various hierarchies of domination: patriarchy, white “privilege,” heteronormativity.

Ironically, these reactive polarities, in both professional intellectual and popular political discourse, have come to stand in a kind of trollish relation to each other, each provoking the other by its mere presence, then seeking to provoke the other even further by strong moral rebuke and increased conceptual rigidity. It is all very — binary.

While postmodern cultural studies continue to develop analyses of ever increasing, and increasingly hermetic, conceptual subtlety and fluidity, they often serve politically, in reality, as powerful reinforcers of binary thinking and action-reaction. One either accepts the analysis or is dreadfully, condemnably wrong, even alt-right and fascist. Similarly, one either rejects the analysis in toto, in contrary inflexible defense of historical cultural norms long in need of conceptual disruption, or, from Karl Marx to Nancy Pelosi, is cast as a far-left destroyer of worlds.

This balanced opposition above is not meant to argue for well-behaved, non-disruptive moderation. The solution to any problem is not the merger of two divergent proposals. The truth is not the midpoint between the correct and the mistaken. Reality is not an agreement in principle between the true and the false. Nor, to the extreme contrary, is it all one way. That isn’t even binary. It’s uniform.

The humanistic study of literature teaches this. It teaches, among its many lessons, that human being and relations are not programmatic — not if they are to remain human. And humans have traveled that wrong, ideological road too many times — in every religious fundamentalism and total system of belief, in the rejection of “bourgeois personal individuality” and in the declaration, still burning up tender, liberatory and social justice lips, that “the personal is political.”

Yet many who oppose that belief with all their might, and who affirm that the personal remains personal, do so coherently only so far as the person concerns themselves, or those of kin and kind. What, after all, is a Trumpist border policy administered as punitive discouragement to approach the border other than an aggressive conversion of some people’s personal lives into other people’s political expression? For years now at the southern border of the United States, the personal has been very much political.

It is hardly the case that there are no valid and meaningful conservative or liberal ends of the spectrum: a person’s humanistic calculus of how to address social problems may, by many factors, regularly lead in one direction far more often than the other. Too many people, however, have magnetized these poles and are drawn, and even more so repulsed, far more and automatically, by the valences themselves rather than by complex and open responsiveness to the social, and human, conditions we all face.

How hard is it, after all, to see ourselves — poor and afflicted in some other land, with just this one life only of our own, and maybe a family’s, to save in this world — desperate or brave enough to do whatever we need to make the journey to the United States, perceived for good or ill as that one chance at survival and even human success? Novels, works of art, about the lives of such people – they are everywhere among us – can aide, if aide is needed, in providing empathetic entry into the subjective humanity of people who, during that spiritual communion of selfhoods, can become ourselves.

Yet, too, how much basic sense of current civilizational development is required to recognize that no nation, not even the U.S., can accept all the people who might deserve, in a more just universe, the benefits of life within its borders? How hard, really, is it to see that “legal” and “illegal” — regulated process — is one equitable determinant of outcomes, yet how much humanity needed, still again, to recognize that indiscriminately expelling from the country millions of people, devastating their lives, would be a means to an end forever sullied by its cruelty? Each of these considerations is a pole in a duality, and the nation is polarized by them all, in binary ideological conflict. A human problem could use a human remedy.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of animal species on earth are sexually binary. It is also true that examples of hermaphroditic species abound. No one asks the giant African land snail if it feels confused by its sexual ambiguity. Humans, though, have it tougher. The hermaphrodite, or intersex person, has long been recognized and symbolically represented in human culture. Societies with genderqueer or third gender variants are known throughout the world. Historically, however, Western culture has mostly suppressed acknowledgement of and morally abjured sexual or gender fluidity: it is simply impossible, and profoundly disturbing, to imagine the number of lives that have run their course on this earth in secret and shamed psychological imprisonment.

Cultural developments have now altered this dynamic. A great liberation is taking place, like a dam bursting. The rushing waters flood everywhere, so along with release, there is damage and disruption: misguided and impatient demands for immediate and wholesale cultural transformation, psychological adjustment, and linguistic change, with fierce moral condemnation even for misspeaking within a rigid vocabulary.

Mistakes will undoubtedly be made: in aggressive demand for the affirmation of alternative identities, it may be that normal-range developmental gender confusion or even more permanent nonconformity will be misconstrued as constitutional gender dysphoria, with lives led astray, deeply confused, and even damaged by the misapprehension. Amidst the change, a great awakening of personal human potential has been politicized by supporters as militant ideological fashion, and in binary opposition, frightened and resistant defenders of the cultural status quo lash out in predictably dehumanizing language. When any public commentator continues to declare that, “[t]ransgenderism is a mental condition…. If you are a biological man and you believe you are a woman, you suffer from a mental disorder,” it is not brave resistance to the forces of political correctness. It is trollish, inhumane speech, no less than the now largely abandoned, morally slanted claims that homosexuality is “abnormal.” It is discourse that responds to profound human matters in just one more ideological thrust and parry. It, too, cruelly reduces and dehumanizes the personal as political.

It is no different with the constituents of racial and ethnic identities and personal response to the pursuit of “social justice” for them. There, too, binary analysis pushes dualistically complicated human experience to extremes.

Among the presiding social goals that vary by culture and tradition in the world, we find the different degree of attention that may be brought to collective harmony in contrast to individual justice. In Western culture generally and American culture especially, justice for the person, in giving each their individual due, has been historically prioritized over a harmonious balance in social equilibrium. Formulated in this way, however, we attend only to the public presence of the private person and establish a binary tension.

There are also our private, hidden selves, of interior desire and defect, that live amid the exterior, public demands we each make on our fellows in social contract. The private conditions, our hidden, interior lives, may be very different from our public personas. The question arises and remains to what degree in society we wish to establish harmony between the private self and public justice — to police our private selves — in order to establish public harmony.

When, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” amid his devastating analytical and moral attack on the American South’s Jim Crown regime, Martin Luthor King, Jr. sought to humanize his portrayal of the sin of legal discrimination, he conjured the examples of a six-year-old daughter and five-year- old son whose personalities were suffering distortion from the “clouds of inferiority” and “bitterness toward white people.”

It was King’s hope and expectation that in time, over time, through the pursuit of full civil rights for African Americans and others and of public social justice, in an unmonitored unfolding of private and personal development and destiny, personal inner harmony would increase: — that the clouds of inferiority might lift and drift and the distortion of personality experience correction. The inner life of the child would achieve greater harmony among its own elements and with the conditions of the social world surrounding it. Public social justice creates conditions for this harmony. Greater social justice, then, by this imagining, precedes more complete harmony, both public and private, for any who are marginalized, neither of which — King and all who followed and worked with him were at pains, literally, to demonstrate — could prevail in the absence of justice. (Conceptually, there was a still prior gesture toward harmony, as King declared the discriminatory civil law to be in discord, out of harmony, with the moral law. Action to create greater social justice restored this harmony as well.)

Of understandably less immediate concern to King, but not out of keeping with his largeness of spirit, is the likelihood, too, that public social justice — the legal requirement that all be regarded equitably before the law — could influence the private selves, too, of those who had been deformed by hate and who would no longer see that deformity of perception mirrored in the public sphere.

What I’ll refer to as identarian social justice, developed now over decades, has reversed this proposed relationship between public justice and private harmony. It seeks to intrude into the private self, through harmonizing rituals of self-correcting acknowledgment and confession, shaming and apology, right belief and vocabulary that, it is imagined, will foster the conditions of public social justice.

This is, simply, as it always has been, from Soviet denunciations to Chinese Cultural Revolution “struggle sessions” and re-education, totalitarianism — the intrusion of the state into the soul.

Ironically, with all the contemporary intellectual shift to focus on the experience of embodiment, including control of and damage to bodies, what we risk forgetting is that ultimate freedom and control reside in the spirit. Control a person’s body and you produce a prisoner, reduce a person to a slave. Crush the spirit, which any master will seek to do, and you produce a cog, an automaton, and the being is no longer a person. Not human.

It should go without saying but did not for half the voting American citizenry in 2024 — and even when said, made no difference — that the humane and acceptable response to such excess is not support for corruption, cowardice, cruelty and lies, in what has been visited by the American public upon itself as the greatest nexus of authoritarian indecency and malice ever to assume power in the history of the United States — the Confederate states actually having declared secession as a separate country.

In his 1955 essay “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin recounts two crucibles of his youthful development — his tortured relationship with his stepfather and his own rageful first encounters with indelible racism in New Jersey. His stepfather was a man so personally deformed by an otherwise understandable, bitter suspicion and hatred of white people that when, in time, he was diagnosed as clinically paranoid, it had been hard to tell the difference. Baldwin, encountering outright discrimination, felt himself capable of murder. But in forgiving his stepfather, he found a way to forgive himself. In the painful wisdom of any Elizabethan revenge tragedy, he concluded, “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

Baldwin reached a further conclusion:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

In achieving this ironic, contradictory perception, of the fluid, uncertain duality of experience, Baldwin echoes others before him. John Keats, in an 1817 letter to his brother, wrote of what he termed, “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In “The Crack Up,” in 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald similarly claimed, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

But it was Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, 13 years before Baldwin, who drew perhaps the clearest implication of this dual vision. G. W. F. Hegel, contra Keats, had reached after reason, and claimed it was in the very unfolding teleology of the world to resolve the contradictory thesis and antithesis in synthesis. Camus, seeming to anticipate how his philosophy of the absurd would commonly be misconstrued, argues that humans are differently fated:

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.

So another duality, as Camus offers it, is that of man and world: human beings beating their fists against the great mountain of experience, reaching after fact and reason, trying to extract clarity from it. We’ve grasped a lot, too. Yet there always seems so much more, resistantly, to be understood. There remain, still, all these “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.”

In that humanistic opening, to the range of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, to the lives of others and the pursuit of knowledge, of our world and of ourselves, through reason and with care, lies the path to any meaningful and worthwhile victory over Trump and the decomposing ism he spreads.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com